Paula Sofia Hohti is Assistant Professor of the History of Art and Culture at Aalto University, School of Arts, Design and Architecture in Helsinki, Finland. She received her PhD in Art History from the University of Sussex. Her research focuses on Italian Renaissance dress, material culture, and decorative arts, with a special focus on their role and function within the classes of artisans and shopkeepers. Her forthcoming monograph on the topic, with the working title Beyond the Palace: Artisans and Material Culture in Renaissance Italy, explores how lower artisanal groups such as bakers, barbers, and shoemakers, understood and experienced Renaissance culture. Hohti has held research positions at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, the European University Institute in Florence, and the University of Copenhagen, and she has been a Principal Investigator in two major UK-based international research projects, the Material Renaissance: Costs and Consumption in Italy 1350–1600 and Fashioning the Early Modern: Creativity and Innovation in Europe, 1500–1850, led by Professor Evelyn Welch. Her publications include the forthcoming “Cheap Magnificence?: Imitations and Low-Cost Luxuries in Renaissance Italy,” in Luxury and the Ethics of Greed in Early Modern Italy (ed. Katherine Kovesi; Brepols); “Dress, Dissemination and Innovation: Artisan Fashions in Sixteenth- and Early Seventeenth-Century Italy,” in Fashioning the Early Modern: Dress, Textiles, and Innovation in Europe, 1500–1800 (ed. E. Welch; Oxford UP, 2016); and “Conspicuous Consumption and Popular Consumers: Material Culture and Social Status in Sixteenth-Century Siena,” in Renaissance Studies (Vol. 24.4, 2010). At Bard Graduate Center, she will work on her book manuscript.